Ed Brill

"We, the Media" review, part 2 -- the community

As I left off the last blog entry about "We, the Media", I was musing about the Lotus community.
One of the big questions that Dan Gillmor's book raises for me is what the value of that community has been for the company I work for and the product I'm responsible for.  And how remarkably consistent that community has been over the years, in terms of mindset, despite changing members and technologies.

There are few business-oriented technologies that seem to inspire a quasi-religious devotion and fervor.  Lotus Notes, however, has always felt that way to me -- even before I came to work for Lotus in 1994.  There are probably a dozen reasons for it (and I suspect you'll give me a few in comments to this posting) --

• the fact that it is collaborative software to begin with.  
• The intensity and passion of an annual event like Lotusphere.  
• The solid community formed on notes.net/LDD/developerWorks.  
• User groups and community groups like DNUG and OpenNTF.  
• The number of times that the product has been declared dead (survivor's instinct?).
• The number of business partners and consultants who devote their whole business to Lotus Notes.  
• E-newsletters, magazines, and bloggers.

The principles that Gillmor describes in his book as the new role of media are all exemplified by the way that the Lotus community interacts, and the way the community has contributed to the success of Lotus Notes.  Gillmor discusses all the new technologies -- blogs, RSS, SMS, etc.) -- that have facilitated the change in media and journalism.  I believe he missed an important one -- instant messaging.  Yes, we already had e-mail and we already had telephones, but IM has made me much more accessible.  How many of you who IM me would have picked up the phone and called someone at a vendor five years ago?  Even Bruce Elgort's quirky habit of IM'ing me random links has made me more responsive and aware of what's going on in the market.

This is why I've been willing to blog some topics that have been a little edgy.  We're still defining policy here -- the idea that a blogger perhaps was fired for something she blogged at Friendster last week is hopefully not the beginning of a trend, though you all know that others have tried to make it happen in other situations.  I said it then and will say it now -- I am willing to take a bit of a credibility risk at times to blog something that deserves some discussion.  

Sometimes I don't like the discussion -- last week's "Cheesecake" episode revealed that I still have a long way to go at my job to repair some very damaged relationships at a customer.  Still, that was one of the best discussions we've had on the blog -- because the customer was willing to describe their side of the story in public (though understandably they didn't sign a name or company name, and I'm OK with that in this narrow case).  I will be an order of magnitude better at my job as a result of the sometimes-painful story told in the 36 comments on that blog entry.

I wouldn't trade this kind of community for anything.  Having spent a long time watching my competition, I'm amazed that there is no similar sense of community participation.  In the last 45 days, there have been two or three topics on this weblog that directly raised questions about Microsoft's market behavior in competing with Lotus.  The first was the analyst report that predicted Microsoft Exchange gaining several points of market share at IBM's expense; the second, another sponsored paper that MS has posted from META Group; the third, the publication and then retraction of a 150+ page book on migrating applications from Notes to .NET.  The deafening silence from the competition in all three of these occurrences speaks volumes about how far Microsoft still has to go to "get" the new media world.  This despite the fact that Microsoft themselves, their PR agency, and one of the external technical editors of the book in incident #3 all read my weblog.  

Did anyone else notice that there is not a single Microsoft Exchange-focused blog or newsletter site that has written a single word about the disputed analyst reports, or about the application migration book?  Yet on the Lotus side, dozens of blogs, e-Pro, SearchDomino, etc. have all dedicated multiple days' worth of output to understanding the news and the issues raised by it.  Why the disparity?  Are Microsoft Exchange customers unaware of what happened (unlikely, since publications like eWeek and Network World wrote about some of it)?  Are they simply used to all these kinds of questionable market tactics, and don't blink an eye?  It is quite surprising, given the verbosity of blogs, newsletters, etc., that there hasn't been a single person -- Microsoft, MVP, customer, analyst, journalist -- to even attempt to tackle the story from another point of view.  

Robert Scoble is a Microsoftie who gets it -- when Longhorn was replanned two weeks ago, not only did he write about his thoughts on the replan, he linked to dozens of other bloggers who had commented on it -- both good and bad (including my blog entry on the topic).  Scoble isn't paid nearly enough for his contribution -- no, creation -- of a community around the Microsoft technologies he espouses.  Other Microsoft organizations could learn a lot from him.

I'll have more to say about this book in the coming days.  If you haven't gotten the message by now, I strongly suggest you buy and/or download it.